Global Cross-Border Real Estate Investment Review 2026

France stands out among large economies: nearly a fifth of everything foreign investors hold there sits in real estate activities. Australia is at 11.4%. The United States, despite receiving the second-largest cross-border property flows in the world, sits at 2.6%, because its foreign investment stock is so large and so industrial. Türkiye is at 1.8%, one of the lowest in the group — foreign capital in Türkiye is in companies, not in buildings.

The gaps are as instructive as the values. Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom — three of the four largest destinations for cross-border property money in Europe — do not publish this breakdown at all.

The corridors official data can see

Four governments publish who their foreign buyers are. Together they show something no global dataset does: which neighbours, which diasporas and which financial centres actually move property capital.

The patterns are distinct. The United States buys from its neighbours: Canada and Mexico together account for 30% of foreign purchases of American homes, with China and India next. Spain buys from northern Europe and across the strait: British, Dutch, German, Moroccan and Romanian buyers are within two percentage points of each other, a remarkably flat distribution. Türkiye's foreign buying is regional and concentrated: Russian buyers alone took 16.9% of homes sold to foreigners in 2025. Australia's commercial approvals came from capital centres, not neighbours: Singapore, the United States and the United Arab Emirates supplied almost half the approved value in the first quarter of 2026.

Australia's line is drawn from a different register: approved commercial investment rather than completed home purchases. That is precisely why Singapore and the Gulf appear where neighbours and diasporas appear elsewhere. Commercial capital travels on balance sheets; residential capital travels on family ties.

What the money bought

In the first half of 2026, cross-border capital went back to the two oldest asset classes. Offices took $22.3 billion, 22% of cross-border turnover — the highest office share since 2022. Retail took $19 billion, 19%. Together they made up more than 40% of all cross-border buying. The cross-border share of global investment reached 22.5%, the highest since 2020: foreign money is a larger part of the market than at any point in five years.

That is a reversal, and the year before explains why it is surprising.

In 2025, announced greenfield and project finance investment in real estate fell by $31 billion, while announced investment in data centres rose by $235 billion. Read quickly, that looks like capital abandoning buildings for digital infrastructure. It is not quite that. The data centre surge is in construction: new capacity being built. Trading in existing, operating data centres went the other way — in North America, annual transaction volume roughly halved, to about $3 billion.

The distinction matters for an owner. Money that builds data centres is contractor and developer money, and it arrives as a project. Money that buys operating assets is investor money, and it arrives as an acquisition. In 2025 there was a great deal of the first and very little of the second.

Taken together, alternatives — data centres, senior living, student housing and the rest — now account for about a fifth of direct transaction volume. They are no longer a niche, but they are not yet a liquid market either.

Doors closing, doors opening

Rules moved in opposite directions on either side of the world.

Taxes tell the same story. The United Kingdom applies a 2% surcharge to non-resident buyers, New South Wales charges foreign buyers 9% and Victoria and Queensland 8%, and Spain taxes rental income from investors outside the European Union at 24% of gross rent with no deductions, against 19% of net for EU investors. Germany, Japan, Poland and the United Arab Emirates apply no foreign-buyer surcharge at all. The distinction is no longer simply "foreign or domestic"; it is which foreign.

And then the result that cuts against all of it. Spain closed its golden visa in April 2025. In the second quarter of 2026, foreign buyers reached 15.98% of all house purchases in Spain — the highest in the history of the series. In several provinces the share is far higher: 46% in Alicante, 37% in Málaga. Meanwhile Türkiye, the only country in this review that links property directly to citizenship, saw sales to foreigners fall 9.4% in 2025 and a further 6.3% in the first eight months of 2026.

Residency schemes are not what move property capital. Price, currency and climate do.

Transparency is the quieter half of the same story. JLL's 2026 index puts the United Kingdom first, Australia third, the United States fourth, Germany tenth and Japan twelfth; Dubai has climbed eleven places in two years to seventeenth, and India entered the top thirty for the first time. The thirteen markets JLL calls highly transparent take more than 80% of direct investment, and their transaction volumes have grown twenty percentage points faster than the rest of the world over two years. Capital does not simply follow yield. It follows the places where it can see what it is buying.

The cost of money turned

For two years, falling interest rates were the assumed backdrop for a recovery in property values. In 2026 that assumption broke.

The Federal Reserve raised rates in September 2026 to 3.75–4.00%, its first increase since 2023. The European Central Bank raised its deposit rate to 2.50%. The Bank of Japan reached 1.25%, its highest policy rate since 1995. Australia raised three times, to 4.35%. Four major central banks tightened at once, with inflation above target in each.

Currencies moved less than the headlines suggest. Measured year-end to year-end, only the Turkish lira and the Indian rupee lost ground against the US dollar in 2025; the euro, sterling, yen, Mexican peso and Australian dollar all gained. For a dollar-based buyer, most of the world became more expensive, not cheaper — which makes the resilience of cross-border volumes in the first half of 2026 more striking, not less.

Prime yields reflect the same pressure. In the second quarter of 2026, prime office yields stood at 3.75% in London's West End, 5.50% in the City, 4.25% in Madrid, 4.60% in Munich and 5.75% in Warsaw. Outside Europe, no comparable free series exists, so we do not quote one.

Where Türkiye sits

Türkiye appears in this report as a case that contradicts the usual story.

It has the weakest currency of the major markets in this review: the lira fell 17.7% against the dollar in 2025, more than any other. It offers the only direct property-to-citizenship route among them, at $400,000. And property companies are a small part of what foreigners own there: 1.8% of the inward investment stock, against 18.6% in France.

That last figure repays a second look, because it measures something different from the sales. The OECD puts foreign holdings in Türkiye's real estate activities at $3.99 billion at the end of 2024 — the whole accumulated stock. Türkiye's own balance of payments records $2.34 billion of property sold to non-residents in 2025 alone. Foreign money arrives in Turkish property as individual purchases by individual buyers, not as stakes in property companies. That is a structurally different market from France or Australia, and it is why headline FDI figures understate how much foreign capital touches Turkish real estate.

Yet sales to foreigners keep falling: 21,534 homes in 2025, down 9.4%, and 13,141 in the first eight months of 2026, down 6.3%. The fall is slowing, but it has not turned. Russian, Ukrainian and Iranian buyers remain the three largest groups. As our Türkiye Inbound Investment Review 2025 showed, foreign capital in Türkiye has been moving out of property and into operating companies for four consecutive years.

A cheap currency and an open door, on their own, do not bring buyers back.

What this means for owners and investors

For an owner of a property or construction business, the buyer pool is narrower than the headline numbers imply and more concentrated in private capital than in institutions. Private investors bought more than institutions and listed vehicles combined. Private capital moves faster, asks different questions and cares more about who is running the business after the sale. Our sector view sets out what buyers examine in this sector.

For an investor looking across borders, the rule changes of the last two years have made jurisdiction a first-order question rather than a detail. A residential strategy that works in Spain is illegal in Australia. The tax treatment of the same rent varies by a factor of two depending on where the investor is resident, not where the building is.

For both, price discovery in most of the world runs through advisers who see transactions directly rather than through published statistics. Four governments name their foreign buyers; the rest of the market is read deal by deal, which is where an adviser with live mandates earns their place.

If you are weighing a sale, a partnership or a cross-border purchase, contact us for a confidential conversation, or start with the Global Readiness Assessment.

What to watch in 2027

• Whether the office recovery holds once this year's rate increases feed into valuations.
• Whether operating data centre assets start trading, which would turn a construction boom into an investable asset class.
• Canada's ban, which expires on 1 January 2027 unless extended again.
• Saudi Arabia's implementation rules, which will show how far the new ownership law goes in practice.
• Gulf capital's direction: the United Arab Emirates supplied 12.7% of Australia's approved commercial investment in one quarter, a scale that was not visible five years ago.
• Japan's first foreign-buyer numbers. The nationality-declaration rule in force since April 2026 should yield a published series from 2027, in a market that has never had one.

Figures reflect the sources and dates listed in the references. Shares calculated from published figures, and totals summed from quarterly data, are our own calculations.